In anticipation of the Guggenheim Museum’s fall show,Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, lead exhibition curator Alexandra Munroe will discuss an aspect of the show as it relates to Watermill’s ambitions. Since the early 2000s, several multi-year, communal projects led by artists, critics, curators, and activists emerged around China. Artists and collectives from Second Life creator Cao Fei, to activist Ai Weiwei created their own asylums, sanctuaries, and laboratories to carry out direct action to effect real change. In doing so, they were at the crest of a broad international current of artist-activists pushing for participatory, process-based, archive-intensive, and socially-engaged practices beyond the white-cube gallery to launch real-world change. As with earlier revolutionary programs in China’s modern history, each destroying one order to erect a more just one, the countryside was where it all unfolded. The common medium was now the Internet, a newly ideal space to act out new kinds of social orders.

Sounds of Silence, and More at Watermill Center Talks

A platform for accomplished workers in every imaginable field

The Watermill Center’s annual summer lecture series provides a platform for accomplished workers in every imaginable field to share the cutting-edge ideas that shape their work. This year’s talks, which begin on Tuesday and continue through Aug. 17, will feature an architect, a research scientist, an artist, a ballet dancer,

Erling Kagge, above, a Norwegian explorer, mountaineer, and writer, will talk about “Silence in the Age of Noise” with his friend Petter Skavlan, a writer and filmmaker, in the Watermill Center’s summer lectures on Tuesday.

a museum curator, a writer, and a mountaineer.

The first program, “Silence in the Age of Noise,” will feature a conversation between two Norwegians, Petter Skavlan, a writer and screenwriter, and Erling Kagge, an explorer, author, publisher, lawyer, and the first in history to reach all three Poles — North, South, and the summit of Mount Everest.

Mr. Kagge is the author of an extended meditation of the same title in which he poses three questions: What is silence? Where can it be found? Why is it more important now than ever? As a man who once spent 50 days walking solo in Antarctica without radio contact, it is likely he has the answers.